Voyagers II - The Alien Within (2 page)

Stoner searched the drawers of the little bureau and found neat stacks of underwear, shirts, and slacks. No shoes, but several pairs of slipper socks.

Without even bothering to look at the size markings, he pulled on a pair of tan slacks and slipped an open-necked, short-sleeved buff-colored shirt over them. He did not bother with the socks. The floor felt comfortably warm.

Then he went to the window again and sat in the little armchair. The glass was all one piece; there was no way to open the window, and Stoner instinctively knew it would be too tough to shatter, even if he threw the chair at it.

Outside he saw lovely green landscaped grounds, dotted with gracefully swaying palm trees. In the distance, a highway busy with traffic, and beyond it a glistening white sand beach and a gentle surf rolling in from the blue ocean.

It did not look like Florida to him. California, possibly. Certainly not Kwajalein.

There were comparatively few automobiles on the highway, but those that Stoner saw looked only a little different from the cars he remembered. A bit lower and sleeker. They still ran on four wheels, from what he could see. He had not been asleep so long that totally new transportation systems had come into being. The trucks looked more changed, shaped more aerodynamically. And their cabs seemed longer, much more roomy than Stoner remembered them. He could not see any sooty fumes belching from them. Nor any diesel exhaust stacks. The trucks seemed to have their own lanes, separated from the automobile traffic by a raised divider.

It was quiet in his room. The highway sounds did not penetrate the window. The glistening bank of equipment that loomed around his shelf bed was barely humming. Stoner could hear himself breathing.

He leaned back in the chair and luxuriated in the pedestrian normality of it. Solid weight. The warmth of the sun shining through the window felt utterly wonderful on his face and bare arms. He watched the combers running up to the beach. The eternal sea, the heartbeat of the planet.

He closed his eyes. And for the briefest instant he saw a different scene, another world, alien yet familiar, vastly different from Earth and yet as intimately known as if he had been born there.

Stoner’s eyes snapped open and focused on the enduring sea, unfailingly caressing the land; on the blue sky and stately white clouds adorning it. This is Earth, he told himself. The vision of an alien world faded and disappeared.

This is Earth, he repeated. I’m home. I’m safe now. Yet the memory of the flashback frightened him. He had never seen an alien landscape. He had never even set foot on Earth’s own moon. But the vision in his mind had been as clear and solid as reality.

He shook his head and turned in the chair, away from the window. He saw that the curves of every monitoring screen had turned fiercely red and jagged. He took a deep breath and willed his heart to slow back to normal. The sensor traces smoothed and returned to their usual soft green color.

A portion of the solid wall between the bureau and the bank of electronic equipment glowed briefly and vanished, creating a normal-sized doorway. Through it stepped a smiling man. Behind him the wall re-formed itself, as solid as it had been originally.

“Good morning,” said the man. “I’m Gene Richards.”

Stoner got to his feet and stretched out his hand. “You must be a psychiatrist, aren’t you?”

Richards’s smile remained fixed, but his eyes narrowed a trifle. “A good guess. An excellent guess.”

He was a small man, slight, almost frail. Thick curly reddish-brown hair and a neatly trimmed mustache. Thin face with small bright probing eyes and strong white teeth that seemed a size too large for his narrow jaw. He looked almost rodentlike. He wore a casual, brightly flowered shirt over denim shorts. His feet were shod in leather sandals.

Stoner dropped back into his chair while the psychiatrist pulled one of the plastic chairs from the wall and straddled it backward, next to him.

“Where the hell are we, anyway?” Stoner asked. “Hawaii?”

Richards nodded. “The big island, just outside of Hilo.”

“This isn’t a hospital, is it? It feels more like some big laboratory complex.”

Again Richards bobbed his head up and down. “Right again. That’s three in a row. Want to try for four?”

Stoner laughed softly. “I have no idea of how long I’ve been—suspended.”

“Eighteen years.”

“Eighteen?…” Stoner felt the psychiatrist’s eyes probing him. Past the man’s suddenly intense face, he could see the row of display screens flickering their readout curves.

The silence stretched. Finally Richards asked, “How do you feel about returning from the dead?”

“I thought they’d bring me back a lot sooner than this.”

“The alien spacecraft was recovered almost twelve years ago. You’ve been kept in cryonic suspension until the biotechnicians figured out how to thaw you without killing you.”

“And the spacecraft?”

Richards’s eyes shifted away slightly. “It’s in orbit around the Earth.”

“The alien himself…”

“He was quite dead. There wasn’t a thing anybody could do about that.”

Stoner leaned back in the chair and glanced out at the sea again.

“I’m the first man ever to be revived from cryonic suspension?” he asked.

“That’s right. The scientists wanted to try some human guinea pigs, but the government wouldn’t allow it.”

“And the doorway you came in through, you learned that trick from the spacecraft.”

Richards nodded again. “That
…trick—
it’s revolutionizing everything.”

“The ability to transform solid matter into pure energy and then back again,” Stoner said.

“How would you…” Richards stopped himself. “Oh, sure. Of course. You’re a physicist yourself, aren’t you?”

“Sort of. I was an astrophysicist.”

“So you know about things like that,” the psychiatrist assured himself.

Stoner said nothing. He searched his mind for the knowledge he had just given words to. The alien’s spacecraft had opened itself to him in the same way: a portion of the solid metal hull disappearing to form a hatchway. But he had never thought about the technique for doing it until the words had formed themselves in his mouth.

“How much do you remember?” Richards asked. “Can you recall how you got to the alien spacecraft?”

It was Stoner’s turn to nod. “The last thing I remember is turning off the heater in my suit. It was damned cold. I must have blacked out then.”

“You remember Kwajalein and the project to contact the spacecraft? The people you worked with?”

“Markov. Jo Camerata. McDermott and Tuttle and all the rest, sure. And Federenko, the cosmonaut.”

Richards touched the corner of his mustache with the tip of a finger. “When you got to the alien’s spacecraft, you deliberately decided to remain there, instead of returning to Earth.” It was a statement of fact, not a question.

“That’s right,” said Stoner.

“Why?”

Stoner smiled at him. “You want to know why I chose death over life, is that it?”

“That’s it,” Richards admitted.

“But I’m alive,” Stoner said softly. “I didn’t die.”

“You had no way of knowing that….”

“I had faith in the people I worked with. I knew they wouldn’t leave me up there. They’d bring me back and revive me.”

Richards looked totally unconvinced. But he forced a smile across his face. “We’ll talk about that some more, later on.”

“I’m sure we will.”

“Is there anything I can do for you?” Richards asked. “Anything you want to know, anyone you want to see?”

Stoner thought a moment. “My kids—they must be grown adults by now.”

The psychiatrist glanced up toward the ceiling, like a man trying to remember facts he had learned by rote. “Your son, Douglas, is an executive with a restaurant chain in the Los Angeles area. He’s thirty-three, married, and has two children, both boys.”

Thirty-three, Stoner thought. Christ, I’ve missed half his life.

“Your daughter, Eleanor,” Richards went on, “will be thirty in a few weeks. She’s married to a Peace Enforcer named Thompson; they make their home in Christchurch, New Zealand. They have two children, also. A girl and a boy.”

“I’m a grandfather.”

“Four times over.” Richards smiled.

A grandfather, but a lousy father, Stoner told himself.

Richards’s smile faded. Slowly, he said, “Your ex-wife died several years ago. A highway accident.”

The pain surprised Stoner. He had expected to feel nothing. The open wound that their divorce had ripped out of his soul had been numbed long ago, covered with emotional scar tissue as thick as a spacecraft’s heat shield. Or so Stoner had thought. Yet the news of Doris’s death cut right through and stabbed deep into his flesh.

“Are you all right?” Richards asked.

Stoner turned away from his inquisitive face and looked through the window, out at the sun-sparkling sea.

“It’s a lot to take in, all at once,” he replied to the psychiatrist.

“Yes,” Richards said. “We’ll take it as slow as you like.”

Stoner turned back toward him. The man was trying to keep his emotions to himself, but Stoner could see past his eyes, past the slightly quizzical smile that was supposed to be reassuring. I’m a laboratory specimen to him; an intriguing patient, the subject of a paper he’ll deliver at an international conference of psychiatrists.

He looked deeper and realized that there was more to it. Richards truly wanted to help Stoner. The desire to be helpful was real, even if it was underlain by the desire to further his own career. And even deeper than that, buried so deeply that Richards himself barely knew of its existence, was the drive to learn, to know, to understand. Stoner smiled at the psychiatrist. He recognized that drive, that urgent passion. He himself had been a slave to it in his earlier life.

Richards misinterpreted his smile. “You feel better?”

“Yes,” Stoner said. “I feel better.”

The psychiatrist got to his feet. “I think that’s enough information for you to digest for the time being.”

“How long will I be here?”

Richards shrugged. “They’ll want to run tests….”

Stoner pulled himself up from his chair. He towered over the psychiatrist. “How long?”

“I really don’t know.”

“Days? Weeks? Months?”

Richards put on his brightest smile. “I truly can’t say. Weeks, at least. Probably a couple of months.” He started for the spot on the wall where the portal had opened.

Stoner asked, “Can I at least get out of this room and walk around the place?”

“Oh, sure,” Richards said over his shoulder. “In a day or so.”

“They’re going to guard me pretty closely, aren’t they?”

The wall glowed and the portal in it opened. “You’re a very important person,” Richards said. “The first man to be revived after cryonic suspension. You’ll be famous.”

Glancing around the bare room, Stoner asked, “Can you get me something to read? I’ve got eighteen years of news to catch up on.”

The psychiatrist hesitated a moment. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll see that you get some reading material. But probably you ought to go slowly—there’s a certain amount of cultural shock that you’re going to have to deal with.”

“Cultural shock?”

“The world’s changed a lot in the past eighteen years.”

“That’s what I want to find out about.”

“In due time. For the first few days, I think we ought to confine your reading to entertainment, rather than current events.”

A sudden question popped into Stoner’s mind. “Markov,” he blurted. “Kirill Markov, the Russian linguist I worked with. How is he?”

Richards made a small shrug. “As far as I know, he’s fine. Living in Moscow again. I believe he sent a message asking about you recently.”

He stepped through and the wall became solid again. Stoner stood in the middle of the room, thinking that the first use of the alien’s technology had been to make a jail cell for him.

Jo Camerata did not sit at the head of the conference table. Vanguard Industries had long ago dispensed with such archaic hierarchical formalities. The president of the corporation sat at the middle of the table, flanked on either side by members of the board of directors, most of them male. A dozen muttered conversations buzzed around the table as Jo took her seat. Directly across from her sat the chairman of the board, Everett Nillson, her husband.

Nillson was a tall, rawboned Swede whose thinning blond hair and bushy eyebrows had been bleached nearly white by the Hawaiian sun. His eyes were such a pale blue that they seemed nearly colorless. His skin was so fair that strangers often assumed he was an albino. He was slow in speech and in movements, which led many an unwary adversary into believing Nillson’s mind worked slowly, too. It did not.

He smiled across the polished mahogany table at his wife, his prized ornament, knowing that he had won her away from several of the other men seated in this plush, paneled boardroom. He had a long, bony, unhandsome face and a smile that looked more pained than pleasured. His hands were big, powerful, with lumpy, irregular knuckles and long, thick fingers. If it weren’t for the perfectly fitted gray summer-weight suit and opulently decorated silk shirt he wore, he could easily have been mistaken for a farmer or a merchant seaman.

Jo smiled back at him, as much to discomfit some of the men seated around the table as to please her husband. She had dressed herself for this meeting in a demure starched white blouse with a high collar and a navy-blue knee-length skirt. Her only jewelry was a choker of black pearls, a diamond-studded pin shaped in Vanguard Industries’ stylized V, and the plain platinum wedding band that Nillson had given her.

As chairman of the board, Nillson called the meeting to order. The room fell silent.

He let the silence hang for a long moment. All eyes were focused on him. Pungent smoke from several cigars and a half-dozen cigarettes wafted up to the ceiling vents. Nillson fixed his gaze on the computer screen set into the table top before him.

Finally, in his surprisingly deep, rich baritone he said, “The first item on our agenda this morning is a report on the cryonic project.” He looked up at his wife. “Darling, if you will be so kind.”

Jo said, “I have a videotaped presentation from Dr. Healy and several of his staff members….”

“But he’s actually awake and doing well?” asked one of the older board members, a heavyset, red-faced man who had received a heart transplant several years earlier.

“Yes,” Jo said, not allowing herself to smile. “He is alive and as healthy as he was eighteen years ago. As far as the medical tests can ascertain, he has not suffered any detectable damage from being frozen.”

She touched a button on the keypad in front of her with a manicured finger. The overhead lights dimmed slightly, and the wall to her left became a three-dimensional video screen. Everyone around the table turned to see.

Keith Stoner stood before them, life-sized and naked.

“This is when he first woke up,” Jo told them.

One of the women board members whispered something. Jo could not catch the words, but the tone was carnal.

Stoner’s image was quickly replaced by Healy’s. The corporation’s chief scientist began to explain, with charts and graphs, that Stoner’s physical condition was so close to his condition as recorded eighteen years ago that the differences were undetectable. Then Richards, the psychiatrist, appeared and said that although Stoner’s reactions appeared normal, he needed further study to “get deeper into the subject.”

A male voice rumbled in the semidarkness, “The shrink’s gay, is that it?”

“Maybe he’s fallen in love with his patient,” someone replied.

A few scattered laughs, most of them self-conscious.

The screen now showed Richards and Stoner strolling together along the grounds behind the building where Stoner was being kept. No walls or fences were in sight, only brightly flowering shrubs of hibiscus and oleander, which hid the lasers and electronic sensors of the security system. The area looked like a university quadrangle, bounded by multistory glass-and-chrome laboratory buildings. But no stranger or lab employee could get within a hundred yards of the carefully screened area where Richards and Stoner walked.

While the board members eavesdropped on their conversation, Jo sank back in her chair and studied Keith Stoner’s handsome face. He had not changed at all. Or had he? His eyes seemed different, somehow. Nothing she could put her finger on, but different.

She had read every word of every transcript of every conversation Keith had taken part in. Not once had he asked about Jo Camerata. Not once had he spoken of the nights they had shared together, so long ago.

She turned slightly in her chair and saw her husband. He was not watching the screen. He was staring directly at her.

The videotape ended and the ceiling lights automatically came back up to full brightness as the screen turned opaque once more.

Jo tore her gaze away from Nillson’s deathly pale eyes.

“Stoner appears perfectly willing to cooperate with us,” she told the board. Then she added, “For the time being.”

“What do you mean?”

“Sooner or later he’s going to want to get out of our lab complex. He’s going to want to see the world—after all, for him it’s a new world. He’s been asleep for eighteen years.”

“He’s much too important to let go,” said the corporation’s executive vice-president, a vigorous-looking man in his early forties, tanned and athletically trim.

“He’s a vital asset,” agreed the older woman sitting next to him.

“We’ve invested an enormous amount of money in this program,” the corporation’s treasurer added, waving his black cigar. “He can’t just go wandering off where we can’t keep him under study.”

“What about the publicity aspects of this project?” Nillson asked, looking down the table to the new director of corporate public relations.

She was a stunningly beautiful Oriental, more than ten years younger than Jo. A face of hauntingly fragile delicacy, almost childlike except for the knowing eyes. A childlike body, too, slim and boyish, which Jo knew attracted her husband more than her own womanly figure. She was a protégée of Archie Madigan’s. By rights she should not have been sitting in on a board meeting; but the chairman had invited her, and Jo knew better than to argue the point.

“The first man to be revived from cryonic suspension,” she said, looking directly back at Nillson, “will be an instant global celebrity. Not only is he a former astronaut and scientist, and the man who went into space to meet the alien starship—he’s the first man to be brought back from the dead. Properly handled, he can be worth billions in publicity, worldwide.”

Jo nodded to show that she agreed with them all. “But I know the man. We worked together, before he…”

She hesitated just the barest fraction of an instant, her mind whispering silently, Before he went off into deep space and chose death rather than returning to me.

“Before he was frozen,” she continued aloud. “Sooner or later he’s going to want the freedom to come and go as he pleases.”

“He’s our property, dammit!” snapped the treasurer. “We spent the money to go out there and rescue him. He owes us his life.”

“And there’s the security question,” the public relations director said, ignoring him and still looking straight at Nillson. “Competitors like Yamagata or Eurogenetics or even Avtech would
love
to get their hands on him. Until we’re ready to reveal him to the world, we’d better be very careful with him.”

Jo replied mildly, “But we don’t own the man.” Turning to the corporation’s chief counsel, she asked, “Do we, Archie?”

Madigan smiled his poet’s rueful smile. “Of course we can’t be going against the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment. But…” He let the word dangle before the board members.

“But what?” the executive vice-president demanded.

The lawyer made a slight shrug. “He’s been frozen alive for eighteen years. He’s been out of touch with civilization, out of contact with the world, for eighteen years. I think we could make a case that he’s not fully competent to be responsible for himself. I think a friendly judge might allow us to maintain custody of him for a while.”

The board members looked pleased at that.

“How long?” asked Nillson.

“Oh, a few months, I should think,” Madigan replied. “Maybe a year.”

“And how long will it be,” Nillson asked slowly, “before the news media discover that he’s awake?”

“There will be no announcement,” Jo responded. “Not yet.”

“Security has been airtight,” Madigan added. “Only the staff scientists who work directly with him know that he’s been revived. To the rest of the personnel he’s just another volunteer subject for the pharmaceutical division.”

Nillson shook his head. “This news is much too big to keep quiet for long.”

The florid-faced heart transplant recipient nodded gravely. “The first man to be brought back from the dead. By God, the reporters will swarm all over him.”

“And our competitors,” the treasurer repeated.

“We’ll move him to a more remote site as soon as the medical tests are finished,” Jo said.

“That might be a very good idea,” her husband agreed.

Jo touched the memo pad on her keyboard. The computer would automatically highlight the previous ten lines of conversation when it printed up the transcript of this meeting.

The discussion moved on to other topics: Vanguard’s pharmaceutical processing plant in orbit was conspicuously over budget; Avtech Corporation had hired away two of Vanguard’s plant managers, one in Karachi and one in Rio: the corporation’s interdivisional communications codes were being changed as a routine security precaution; terrorists from the World Liberation Movement had bombed the biotechnology factory in Sydney, nobody killed but half a million dollars’ worth of damage to the organ-cloning production line; the European division’s construction unit had run into unexpected snags in its contracts to build airports and civil improvements in Bulgaria (“Damned Commie bureaucrats want their bribes increased,” groused one board member); angry crowds had staged a violent demonstration at the former corporate headquarters in Greenwich, insisting that Vanguard had developed a cure for cancer that it was keeping secret (“I only wish,” Nillson murmured, drawing a big dollar sign on his scratch pad); the airline division was being sued in the World Court for its refusal to fly its scheduled routes into the countries involved in the Central African War.

In all, the corporation’s profits for this quarter would be down some 8 to 10 percent, even though total sales volume from all its divisions appeared to be nearly 12 percent higher than the same quarter the previous year.

“Too much money being spent unproductively,” Nillson said mildly.

The public relations director turned her most feminine smile on the board chairman. “And we don’t really have any new products to show, to take the attention off the lower profits. Not unless we make a major effort on the frozen astronaut.”

“It’s too early for that,” Jo snapped.

“Then the media’s going to ask why our profits are down, and why R and D isn’t producing.”

Research and development was Jo’s special area. She realized that the public relations director was openly challenging her.

Very sweetly, Jo said, “When you get old enough to be stricken by a terminal disease—like maybe cancer or a sudden stroke—you’ll be willing to spend everything you have for the products of our
unproductive
R and D. Maybe you’ll even want to have yourself frozen for a few years, until the medical people can work out a cure for whatever is killing you. Then the money we’ve spent on our cryonics and other R and D programs will seem like a good investment to you.”

The Oriental girl’s lips pressed into a colorless line. But before she could answer Jo, Nillson said, “R and D has been very important to this corporation’s growth, we all know that. But we must keep a careful watch on expenses. No one in this organization has a blank check.”

Murmurs of assent spread around the table.

Jo smiled at her husband and realized that the woman was making a brazen play for him—and he seemed willing to see how well she could do. Looking around the table, Jo saw at least three people who would soon have a vital personal interest in being frozen until a terminal illness could be reversed. If it came to a real fight with the public relations director, Jo knew she would win.

But it won’t come to that, she told herself. I’ll have the little bitch out of here without anyone in this room knowing what happened to her. Or caring.

The meeting finally ended, and Jo started back toward her office. Nillson fell in beside her, and together they walked along the glass-walled corridor back to her executive suite.

They made a striking couple. She was dark fire, a long-legged beauty with the deep suntan, midnight-black hair, and stunning figure of a classic Mediterranean enchantress. He was pallid ice, taller than she, lean and spare, cold where she was fiery, wan where she was vibrant, a pale distant frosty Northern Lights compared to the blazing intensity of the tropical sun.

“You’re not going back to your office?” Jo asked as they strode in unison down the corridor.

“I want to ask you something.”

“Where we can’t be overheard,” she realized.

He dipped his chin slightly in acknowledgment. Offices can be bugged. Secretaries can be bribed. A busy corridor connecting the president’s suite with the offices of the chairman of the board and the board’s meeting room could be more private than any sanctum sanctorum.

“Did Healy tell you that he doesn’t sleep?”

Jo looked up sharply at her husband. His face was perfectly controlled, no hint of any emotion whatsoever.

“What did you say?”

“He doesn’t sleep,” Nillson repeated. “Your man Stoner has not slept at all in the four days since he has been revived.”

Jo said nothing. There was no need. Nillson knew full well that the scientist had not told her. Her thoughts swirled wildly. Keith doesn’t sleep! Why? What’s gone wrong? And why did that sonofabitch Healy tell my husband instead of me?